Performance History
The world premiere of the fully staged opera occurred on June 20, 2008 in Northampton, Massachusetts at the Academy of Music Theater, the city's 800-seat 1892 opera house, one of the oldest municipally owned theaters in the nation and not unlike Ford's Theatre. The performance featured the Boston Modern Orchestra Project conducted by Gil Rose. Principal performers included Janna Baty as Laura Keene, Drew Poling as Ned Emerson, Alan Schneider as Harry Hawk, Aaron Engebreth as Jack Matthews, and Tom O'Toole as John Wilkes Booth. Stage direction was by Carole Charnow, general director of Opera Boston.
The opera had been previously performed in a concert version on March 31, 2007 at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, with the same principals as above along with the Amherst College Concert Choir.
Read more about this topic: Our American Cousin (opera)
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or history:
“The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience there is no theater. Every technique learned by the actor, every curtain, every flat on the stage, every careful analysis by the director, every coordinated scene, is for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, our evaluators, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.”
—Viola Spolin (b. 1911)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)